The first production HondaJet achieved its initial flight, marking another milestone toward aircraft certification and entry into service in 2015. The event took place at the company’s world headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina. “With this first flight, the HondaJet program has entered the next exciting phase as we prepare for delivery,” said Honda Aircraft Company …
Militants whose bombs have shut Iraq’s main northern oil export pipeline for 40 days are preventing repairs, threatening to extend an outage that is already the longest since the days of sanctions in the 1990s. Targeting the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline where it crosses a stretch of desert known as Ain al-Jahash, or Donkey Springs, the saboteurs …
Human hopes of reaching stars other than the Sun are currently limited by the maturity of advanced propulsion technologies. One of the few candidate propulsion systems for providing interstellar flight capabilities is nuclear fusion. In the past many fusion propulsion concepts have been proposed and some of them even explored in high detail (Project Daedalus), …
Solve for X: People accelerating progress on technology moonshots. Natural gas would be far more useful if we could store it. Now we have to use high pressure or refrigeration. Metal organic frameworks can be used for storage and separation. If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. …
In 1970, there were 360 million Africans and they amounted to a tenth of the world’s population. If fertility were to drop roughly in line with Asia’s 1970-2000 trajectory, there would be 2.1 billion Africans by 2050. If it continues on its current path, there will be 2.7 billion—a quarter of the global population then. …
A newly developed body armor, complete with built-in sensors that can measure the damage a hit would cause to the unprotected body, is set to revolutionise the sport of mixed martial arts. The high-tech armor, has been designed by Unified Weapons Master, not only to protect but also to register the real force behind each …
Google has acquired artificial-intelligence company DeepMind Technologies Ltd. The tech website Recode reported that Google paid $400 million for the startup based in London. DeepMind describes itself as a “cutting edge artificial intelligence company. They combine the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms. The company was founded …
Water covers 71 percent of Earth’s surface — and industrial-scale desalination has operated successfully around the world for many years. Desalination costs are still high, and not everyone lives near a seacoast — so getting the water where it’s needed, when it’s needed, can be prohibitively expensive. Policymakers, farmers, business leaders, and ordinary people around …
Bill Gates spends a lot of time trying to advance innovation that improves people’s lives in the same way that fertilizer did. A full 40 percent of Earth’s population is alive today because, in 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to make synthetic ammonia. Another example: Polio cases are down more …
Mix together air, fuel, and heat and you get combustion, the chemical reaction that powers most engines in planes, trains and automobiles. And if you throw in some ionized gas (plasma), it turns out, you can sustain combustion even in conditions that would otherwise snuff out the reaction: at low air pressure, in high winds …
Friday was the 50 year anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. Saturday was the 50 year anniversary of Doctor Who. the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who – titled The Day of the Doctor was shown last night. The article through this link has spoilers. This is an episode which is steeped in Doctor …